


angel boy

by softsocky



Series: rockstar rocky au [3]
Category: ASTRO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fix-it fic, M/M, also dont be weird about some of the content sanha is twenty six years old, but!! its got a HAPPY ENDING, cool thanks, nurse sanha, rockstar rocky, sorry y'all its still pretty angsty, this is the sequel to sanha's song that i was threatened into writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 01:59:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13560285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softsocky/pseuds/softsocky
Summary: When he comes through the door fifteen minutes later, his 'I love you' doesn’t sound croaky anymore.





	angel boy

**Author's Note:**

> [[part one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13401915)]  
> [[part two](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13447719)]
> 
> you will 100% to read those to understand this tbqh........ily. this is really, really messy, and - as usual - unedited, so dont hate on me. ok thanks.

It’s tough because this Rocky is his favourite Rocky: sleepy and soft and wrapped up in his arms like he had never even left them. _It’s tough_ because this Rocky is the same Rocky he’s used to, except now his hands are coarse and his eyes are empty. Months on the road and in the air and on the stage meant his immune system had suffered, and while Sanha’s heart broke, Rocky’s voice did, too.

 

The morning after Rocky returned home and Sanha had awoken to the sound of him groaning from where he stood in the shower. The bathroom door was slightly ajar, and steam was beginning to roll into the room. Sanha remembers thinking the windows were as foggy as his brain felt as he pushed his blankets aside, stepping out onto the cold timber floorboards. Sanha could tell something was wrong the moment he saw him. He was shaking, _shivering_ , despite the obvious scalding temperature of the water.

Sanha wanted to reach out to him, run his hand down the curve of his spine like he used to, but he didn’t, couldn’t, not when he knew what he knew. He instead turned and fled the room, dragged out paracetamol and water and sat it on Rocky’s bedside table, slipped back underneath the sheets. Rocky had emerged not much later, skin red and tender, thinner than Sanha had remembered. Their eyes meet and its silent and there’s a heavy weight in the air Sanha puts down as awkwardness before he rolls over, eyes etched into the walls like they had always belonged there. He heard Rocky take the water and the pills before disappearing from the apartment. News headlines told him later that the rest of the bands tour was cancelled due to an ailment.

Sanha wasn’t entirely sure if he was happy about that or not.

 

 _This_ morning, though, is a few days later, and Rocky’s voice is still as rough as his hands. Sanha is later sitting at the kitchen table, the hand-painted blue chair clashing with the red leather armchair, which in no way matched the green coffee table or the yellow table at which he sat. It was eclectic, Rocky had said, when they searched flea markets and second-hand stores for mismatched pieces. Rocky had this idea that the unique pieces were kind of like them – quirky and different and bright and perfect. Sanha thought that too, at least, for a while. Now, though, as the silence sits heavy and solid between them, he starts to think that Rocky was wrong. Or rather, right, but in the wrong kind of way.

The blue chair didn’t match the yellow kitchen table and the red arm chair didn’t match the green coffee table; it was mismatched and uncoordinated and it didn’t really _work_. _Like us,_ Sanha thinks now, as Rocky places a mug of coffee in front of him. _We’re so different,_ his head is screaming at him, _you’re mismatched._

They sit in total silence, Rocky’s throat mending slowly around mouthfuls of honey and salt water and hot milk drinks. Sanha’s heart though, that is a different story.

_It’ll never work._

_It’ll never work._

_It’ll never work._

Sometimes, when they’re sitting at the table together each morning, Rocky scanning over the newspaper, though not really reading it; and Sanha, hands overlapped around the mug in his hands, foot tapping aimless patterns on the floor, he lets himself slip his eyes closed; let’s himself slip into a dreamland.

Everything’s the exact same in this dreamland. Rocky isn’t speaking to him and he’s still reading the newspaper, and Sanha’s foot is still tapping away at an invisible tune.

The only different is that in this dreamland, when Sanha gets up to leave for work and Rocky says _I love you_ , Sanha actually believes him.

 

When Rocky says _I love you_ now, it’s rough like his hands and throat, empty like his eyes. Sanha can’t remember the last time he had said it back to him.

 

Sanha still loved him, though. This much was true. Sanha loved him more than he hated him – and Sanha had thought he hated him more than he loved him. Love’s funny like that, Sanha thinks. Love is so very similar to life. It’s painful and brings more misery than anything else. But just like life, when Love gives you a good thing, it makes all the bad worth it.

Sanha finds himself praying to that God again, the one he doesn’t believe in, that the good things will come back to him.

 

Rocky will always rise before him. Rocky will always make him breakfast and a coffee, and another coffee, too, in his thermos so he can drink it on his way to work. It’s little and thoughtful and far-too familiar, reminds him of the life they had before it all fell into chaos.

When Sanha goes to leave for work, neither of them say good bye. That’s fine, Sanha thinks. If neither of them say it, neither of them can meant it.

 

Before the tour started, Rocky would always be home before Sanha was. It suited them well, and it _worked_ , because sometimes his job was heavier than the world, and it pressed down painfully on Sanha’s shoulders. It was on days like this that Sanha knew he could come home and Rocky would hold him and ease the tension from his tendons, and things would be alright. It would be messy and tangled and intimate and warm, but it was satisfaction and it was love and it was a mutual understanding and support that made Sanha love him more and more.

Now, though, Sanha drags his feet up to the front door. He goes to unbolt it, but finds it already unlocked. It shouldn’t have shocked him as much as it had: Rocky _was_ home. But for Sanha, who had spent six months unlocking the door every damn day, it was natural for him to startle at the courtesy.

When he steps through the threshold, he finds Rocky hovering by the door way to the kitchen, adjoined to the entrance hall. There’s a moment of utter silence – this unfamiliar to him now, with or without Rocky in his presence – before there’s this heart wrenching sound coming from deep within his chest, and then suddenly, there are warm arms around him. They remind him of summertime and the first fall of Autumn, the first snow of Winter; reminds him of the Spring that comes each year, birthing new life and beauty and colour into the world. Reminds him of _home._ Reminds him of all the shit they had been through, but how in this very moment, it didn’t at all matter. It didn’t matter because Rocky was brushing his hair out of his eyes, where they stuck into the wet strands of his eyelashes, eyes red and abused from tears. His cheeks were flushed and blemished, from stress and from everything else, too.

Some days, Sanha is able to separate himself from the trauma of being a nurse – watching patients come and go, isolate himself from what that all means. Death and life and everything in between becoming heavier and more than just words to him. Because he knows in the mix of it all there’s a family and a friend and quite possibly a lover, another heart, strung together to the next one, and Rocky holds him – holds him through it, right there in the hallway. 

Sanha doesn’t know how long he cries for, but knows it’s not long enough for all the death he had seen. Now and then a patient will click with you; and that was what had happened.

 _They were on the mend, Rock,_ Sanha croaked out later, when Rocky had carried him to their bedroom, had wrapped blankets up and around him in a cocoon-like fashion. _I lost them, I lost them!_

 

 _They were on the mend,_ Sanha repeats to himself, much later, days after, even. Can’t help but selfishly think they were, too.

 

_I lost him._

_I lost him._

_I lost him._

 

Sanha thinks life is unfair and cruel when he returns home later than normal. The apartment is cold and quiet and not a single light is on. Rocky isn’t here. Sanha stands in the shower for twenty minutes before finally lifting his arms to grab at the soap. He spends another ten minutes scrubbing his skin raw, getting off the smell of medical grade hand soap and bleach and bile and Rocky and whatever the damn else.

He pads into the kitchen in nothing but his towel around his waist, because he’s home alone and he can do that now, because he doesn’t have to fear intimacy with a man who forgot his existence for six months.

That was a tough thing, too, not just the familiarity of the man’s face that slept in the bed bedside him.

Sanha and Rocky had yet to kiss since he returned. Sanha feared the way his hands would itch to dance along his skin, and whenever he succumbed to that feeling, he would always regret it later. It was _tough_ , because Rocky was a tempting creature, and he was also as warm as he was charming, as he was loving, and though their lips had not yet reacquainted themselves, their hands had, their hips had.

But that isn’t the same, Sanha thinks. Sex isn’t the same as love and love definitely isn’t sex. Now, with the way things are, the sex doesn’t even feel intimate anymore – because his heart not there. His heart is miles away, thinking about the birthday phone call that went unmade, the anniversary that Rocky forgot.

But then he’s turning on the radio on the kitchen windowsill and _Sanha’s Song_ is playing, and it makes his hands fumble and almost drop the still-warm plate of left-overs in the fridge. Rocky had made him dinner, and Sanha hadn’t been home. Rocky went out again, but not before tucking him away a plate of food with a post-it-note attached, a rough scrawl of

_I love you, Yoon Sanha – be home soon. Xx_

Sanha eats his dinner and is reminded of the first time Rocky had cooked this very meal for him. It was not their first date, no; not their second, nor was it their third. It was somewhere between their twelfth and twentieth, if Sanha can recall it all correctly.

By the time Rocky comes home, Sanha is already in bed. He’s wide-awake, but feigns sleep when the elder sneaks inside. He listens to him kick off his shoes and shuck out of his jeans, dragging his shirt over his shoulders and throwing the lot into the dirty clothes basket. When he turns, Sanha’s eyes are closed again, so he misses seeing the tears in his boyfriend’s eyes – doesn’t miss _hearing_ them, though.

Normally, in any other situation, Sanha would reach out to him and hold him close, tell him everything would be ok in the end. But Sanha was sick of empty promises and he wasn’t going to start making any of his own now. So, sleep he fakes, until the falsehood of it slips rapidly into a violently dark shade of reality.

 

When he wakes up the next morning, the bed sheets are cold beside him.

 

Weeks pass like this. Sanha will wake up with Rocky already long gone – but there will be breakfast in the fridge for him, a note with a little _I love you_ stuck right on top of the cling film. He’ll go to work without seeing him, come home without seeing him, too. The only way Sanha knows Rocky is still alive is that there’s always dinner in the fridge for him, in the same place his breakfast plate had been just hours before. There was always a note on his dinner plate, too, a few more ‘xx’s on the bright yellow fluoro as more weeks went by.

It wasn’t the same, Sanha thinks – though it was getting there. The intimacy was long lost, at least, the physical side for now, and Sanha had so many unanswered questions, which would remain that way until Sanha dare ask Rocky. It wasn’t the same, but he was trying. Rocky was trying to make amends, was trying to rebuilt that trust, refortify the house he had willingly watched burn to the ground.

 

Sanha doesn’t entirely trust him, but he keeps every single post-it-note in the bedside table drawer just in case.

 

Sometimes, at night, Sanha can hear him hacking away with his dry cough, a groan protruding into the air once it’s done, before he’ll slip out of the bed and out the door. Sanha doesn’t know where he goes, but when he returns hours later, waking Sanha up from the dip in the bed from his weight, he smells like night-time and outside and like wet soil.

Had the lights been on, he would have seen the smudge of ink along his hands and fingers where he had gripped a pen too tightly and for too long.

 

When Sanha puts a load of washing on, he finds his pink sweater at the bottom of the basket. Normally, he would only ever get it dry cleaned, to preserve it, to keep in-tact. He goes to throw it in along with the rest of the dirty clothes, but find he’s unable to release it from his grip. Instead, he drops it back into the basket, hoping he’ll forget it ever existed in the first place.

 

All of a sudden, though, things change. Soon, the silence evaporates. Rocky isn’t home often, but he calls every morning and every night, and the times that he doesn’t, he’ll send a text followed by a selfie or a photo of where he’s been that day. Sanha doesn’t understand it, but likes the tingling feeling he gets in his tummy when he sees Rocky’s caller ID light up the screen of his phone.

Rocky tells him about their new album preparation, the fantastic support that he had been receiving from the fans despite having to cancel twenty shows. Tells him about new interviews and shuts down rumours and tells him about upcoming concerts. Tells him everything, except the things he wants to know: the six-month period of time where time itself lost all value and meaning, and so did their relationship.

He tells him everything, except the things he wants to hear, and it’s after more weeks pass that Sanha realises he can’t keep this up. Can’t keep this relationship – this _whatever_ – on life support for much longer. You can feed and feed something as much as you but if they’re not willing to bite there’s not much use.

 

Rocky beats it to him, though.

It’s a rare night that Sanha finds Rocky at home. He had come home later, as normal, but Sanha was still awake in bed and hadn’t found the time nor energy to feign sleep. Rocky had made eye contact with him, but made no effort to speak to him. Nor did Sanha, just let his lips tug up the slightest bit around the edges, a kind of neutral acknowledge of the others existence.

Rocky sort of smiles back, and for a split second, Sanha feels like everything should be easy again. It should be easy to just reach out to him and hold him close, like they had done just a few weeks ago, lose himself in Rocky’s smooth and tan expanse of skin, no matter how empty he felt inside afterwards. He doesn’t understand them. Doesn’t understand how after six months apart Rocky could come back and Sanha had instantly let him back in his bed. How after a few weeks of that it seemed Rocky didn’t even want to be there anyway, and left on his own all over again. And Sanha should have taken that as a sign that perhaps this wasn’t going to work out, never _had_ , never _would_ , but he just couldn’t – and so he found himself here, in this same mindset, missing the feeling of Rocky’s skin beneath his fingertips, beneath the curve of his own body.

But it was all a hoax, really. Sanha knew it wasn’t his skin he missed; it was much more than that. It was what was under the skin, running faster than blood and sitting more prominent than his heart.

Sanha missed his _soul._

 

Rocky beat him to it because after he climbed into bed beside Sanha, there was only five minutes of silence spread out around them before he broke it. His throat is still croaky though it’s nowhere near as bad, well-and-truly on the mend, now. Sanha can’t really say the same for his heart.

“Why didn’t you write back?”

Sanha’s head jerks back on the pillow at that, putting a pillows worth of space between them. “What?”

“Why didn’t you write back,” he repeats, shuffling his feet into a more comfortable position under the sheets, pushing his face deeper into the pillow. “—to my letters?”

 _Letters?_ “What letters?”

Rocky scoffs at him, rolling his eyes. “The letters I wrote to you when I was on tour. You know, _those_ letters?”

Sanha isn’t able to see his own face, can’t see what expression has taken residence there, but the mix of emotions on Rocky’s face must mimic his own. “I wrote you nearly _two hundred_ letters, Sanha. How could you…”

He trails off, shaking his head, unable to finish. He rolls over onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. “I’m _trying_ to make this work, but you’re not _giving_ me anything to work with.” His voice is laced with anger and annoyance, something sounding like defeat, and something else that Sanha can’t quite place.

He can place his own emotions quite well. What he feels is fury. “Get out.”

Rocky’s head snaps back to him, red cheek pressed to the white pillow, a sickening sort of contrast. “Excuse me?”

“Get out,” Sanha repeats himself, more venomous now. Rocky’s eyebrows are raised to match Sanha’s temper. “Don’t try bring in your excuses now, Rocky. You fucked up. You _know_ you did. I’m sick of your _shit_ and your _lies_ , and you _keep lying_ to cover up those lies!”

Sanha jerks up in the bed, shuffling further along his side, toes hitting the cold floor. The sheets pool off the side and drag along the ground, though Sanha makes no move to fix it. “I’m sick of you lying to me, Rocky; _so, get out!”_

Sanha is shuffling things from around the room that are evidently Rocky’s own. He can hear Rocky muttering something over and over, but he pays no mind. It isn’t until has him shoved out to the front door, shoes and jeans and a shirt in his arms, that Sanha listens.

“ _No, no baby – Angel! Please, Angel, I’m not lying! I’m not ly—_

Sanha slams the door before he can finish.

 

Sanha remembers waking up at five o’clock in the morning and finding the bed sheets beside him cold and stiff. He touches at the empty space, desperately wishing for it to all have been some kind of sick joke, and that Rocky would come sauntering back through the door, back into their bed, back into his arms. But for the next hour that Sanha lies awake, watching the door he had pushed Rocky out of months ago, not once does he feel any kind of indication that he’d actually come back through it.

 

 

A few days later and Sanha turns on the news. Rocky isn’t home and won’t ever be home, because Sanha kicked him out and Rocky left without taking his keys. They’re still hanging on one of the hooks by the front door, and yet Sanha doesn’t have the heart to get rid of them.

The news is its normal round of international horror, and its gloomy enough to make Sanha’s life less traumatic, makes it fickler. IT’s comforting, in a way, no matter how sick it truly is. Sanha watches the news and is reminded of how lucky he really is. But then—

Then the headline changes, and talks about a court case about a band suing their record label for misconduct and something else Sanha brushes over. He’s about to turn it off when he sees Rocky’s face on the screen, a little and grainy on their ageing television, but he’s still so beautiful. His voice almost mended, just a little on the dry side still. Sanha’s chest aches, where his heart is, and he’ll forever be surprised by the fact that he had not died of heartbreak.

Rocky talks about _misconduct_ being a mishandling of information and private documents, and whilst he nor the reporters go into any more detail, quickly changing headlines, Sanha feels nauseated all over again.

 

Sanha hasn’t forgotten about the pink sweater at the bottom of the hamper, but he hasn’t washed it yet, either.

 

The letters start arriving a few days after the news headline; a few days after Rocky’s band had dropped their record label. There’s a new letter each day, and each one has a date which corresponds to a day during Rocky’s tour.

Sanha feels sick because it was _him_ that had accused him of lying, had kicked him out, had banished him from whatever scraps of their relationship remained. Soon, the days start to overlap – Sanha finds it hard to believe an entire year had passed, but it had, and soon Sanha’s birthday draws near. The morning of, there’s no letter, but a package filled with the tacky souvenirs Sanha had asked Rocky to get him from America, one from each state he had performed in.

There’s another package, too, later that day, with today’s date on it. It’s a scrap book, but it’s empty, and the note attached on the inside says _for later_ in Rocky’s messy handwriting. Sanha cries himself to sleep because whilst it’s not perfect, it’s getting there.

_It’s getting there._

Sanha’s taken to sleeping on the couch again. For some reason, it feels like a homecoming.

The letters he receives daily explain everything. Sanha learns that the blonde Rocky had been seen with was not a lover, but a piano coach Rocky had met in the States. Another letter which talks about the new single – Sanha’s Song – tells him that it’s for him, obviously. For their anniversary, Rocky had sent the longest letter there was; it was twelve pages of angst and love and sap that Sanha hadn’t known Rocky was capable of. There were photos attached, too, old ones from the days they had started going out. They were ones Sanha had lost to Rocky’s phone, but now he had physical copies, and the physical heartbreak hurt just as bad as the mental break, too.

 

There’s a new letter every damned day, until one day, until—

Until it’s been a year since the day Rocky finally came home, and Sanha realises that there would be no new letter. It had been so long, Sanha realises, since he had seen Rocky last. He doesn’t know where he is, has gone; knows that all his things are still here. Knows that he can’t have gone far, because he still pops up on the news and he’s on interviews on the radio. Although it _hurts_ , Sanha’s relieved to know that Rocky hasn’t run off with another man yet.

So, when morning comes, Sanha expects nothing – he expects nothing, but he gets _something._ A new letter, envelope far crisper than any of the others had been. The ink smells freshly printed and the creases in the paper much less hurried and rushed.

It’s full of legal jargon and words Sanha doesn’t fully understand, but from what he does understand, it’s enough to bring Sanha to his knees in the lounge room, head leaning back against the couch cushions. On the coffee table in front of him sits the empty scrapbook Rocky had given him for his birthday, and his heart shudders in his chest.

 _Our record label intercepted my mail_ it read, and then later, further down the scrawl, _they wanted to establish a break up between us_. Then, on another page altogether, _a straight singer is easier to sell than a gay one._

Sanha’s heart stops shuddering and instead begins to gurgle like gone-off milk, and his fingers itch further inside the envelope for the plastic case weighing it down. It was a CD; plain and silver with nothing else printed on it aside from _Angel Boy_ on the transparent cover. Sanha recognises it as Rocky’s handwriting instantly, and can tell from the scratchy sound on the audio file when he presses play that it’s his voice, too.

Just like _Sanha’s Song_ , it’s a lyrical masterpiece – a masterpiece which just so happens to be about him again. It’s faster and heavier and angrier, but it’s no less beautiful. Sanha listens to it twenty-three times before he’s dragging himself to bed and falling asleep.

 

When he wakes up, Sanha finds that he’s sick of waking up to cold bed sheets. He’s dialling the number before he can think twice, called Rocky up on his phone and whispering down the line, _“please come home_.”

When he comes through the door fifteen minutes later, his _I love you_ doesn’t sound croaky anymore.

 

It’s much later that Rocky is taking Sanha out for their anniversary dinner, to make up for the two they had lost to time and distance and anger. Sanha’s by the front door, half in, half out, testing the weather. He nods once to himself, curtly, and then yells back inside.

“Rocky! Can you bring me a jumper? It’s colder than I thought!”

He hears him hum in acknowledgement, and then a moment later, Rocky’s coming out with a sheepish grin and Sanha’s pink cashmere sweater in his hands. It looks freshly laundered, too, much to Sanha’s surprise, as he had yet to remove it from the bottom of his laundry basket.

“This one do, Angel?”

Sanha grins, nods once again, gentler this time though, to match his eyes. “It’s perfect.”

 

At the restaurant, they ask the waitress to take a photo of them as they’re eating dessert, and the very next day Rocky gets it printed. Sanha is giggling into Rocky’s side the entire time, because the lightings bad and it’s a little blurry, but Rocky says it’s his favourite photo of the two of them.

When they get home, back to their mismatched furniture, Sanha realises it’s not that mismatched at all. It’s perfect, Sanha thinks – different, like us. _We clash and tumble and we don’t make sense, but it works. Somehow, we still work._

Rocky heads straight over to the coffee table, picks up the empty scrapbooks. He opens it to the first page, and Sanha watches him finger over the _for later_ printed on the inside cover. He turns to look at him over his shoulder.

“Is it later yet, you think?’

Sanha doesn’t really have any words, so instead, he goes and finds the sticky tape.

 

 

 

 _"_ _i'm scared to get close and i hate being alone,_  
_i long for that feeling to not feel at all,_  
_the higher i get the lower i'll sink,_  
_i can't drown my demons they know how to swim._

 _can you hear the silence?_  
_can you see the dark?_  
_can you fix the broken?_

_can you feel my heart?"_

\- bring me the horizon, '[can you feel my heart?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJJYpsA5tv8)'

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> im sorry. [[tumblr]](http://softsocky.tumblr.com/)


End file.
